Page 94 of The Shape of Monsters
“Lyric,” Maimeri says.
Lyric blinks. The other miran is stretched next to him in bed, and in the very dim candlelight, ahz red eyes are like lights in a deep dark sea. “Little Rabbit,” he says, liking the mirané meaning.
Maimeri touches the cool skin under Lyric’s left eye. “This is what she did.”
“Mmm, yes,” Lyric murmurs. “An argument right in my face.” That makes him laugh, and he wishes he could tell her.
“It’s beautiful.”
Lyric can’t think about it right now, but he can take Maimeri’s hand and press it to his chest, folding both his own hands over it. He closes his eyes as Maimeri lies fully down with ahz warm hand over Lyric’s heartbeat.
In the morning Lyric wakes early, hungry. Not groggy or disoriented, but feeling very clear. He waits for Maimeri and they rise together. This time Lyric hunts for a razor and finds it. He’s needed to shave for a few days, and in the cloudy mirror he wonders if he should give up and grow a beard at the same time he’s regrowing his hair. He never has because Silent priests do not. His father had a beard, as well as many mirané men. Garnet seemed to enjoy shaving his in fashionable patterns like a half-mask. But the shadows on Lyric’s jaw and under his nose make him uncomfortable, so he doesn’t.
After, they go out into the frosty air. Lyric startles when his breath puffs visibly before his face, and he laughs again. The laughter takes physical form, too. Maimeri watches Lyric make this discovery with something unreadable on ahz face.
Sah’set’s husband feeds them a hot porridge with dried fruits and leftover sweet-boiled pork from the night before. The family piles goods into extra bags and insists Lyric and Maimeri take them upthe mountain. They know Maimeri won’t return until the first hints of spring, which out here will be over two months from now. Lyric didn’t realize what he was agreeing to when he said he’d go to the mountain, but he can’t regret it, either. Wintering in a valley with Maimeri and whatever so-called monsters az has can’t hurt his cause. It will give him time to know Maimeri and convince ahz of the mission to return to the crater and start a new world, even at the cost of ahz mother. Lyric is sure he can make it sound grand and glorious, not absolutely absurd. Or at least both.
Setka vibrates with eagerness despite her new friends hanging all over her. She puts on a slightly regal facade, as if she must go on a quest up the mountain, alas, alas, how they will be missed. Lyric aches to see her playing, for reasons he can’t quite name. But it’s good, and the three of them go.
It will take five or six hours to reach the valley, Maimeri says, if they don’t dawdle or rest. Setka hisses at ahz, in a friendly way, accepting the challenge. She scrambles ahead, using her claws sometimes, though the way is not really that steep.
Maimeri takes Lyric’s hand for the start, before the path narrows to a rocky outcropping that winds through tall, rough trees still scattering brown needles. Lyric doesn’t mind the contact, though he’s surprised at himself for allowing it. Maybe it’s Iriset’s influence.
He can’t help breathing through his mouth, just to see the crystallized air, visible, cold, and wet against his lips. It doesn’t grow old even as they climb. His thighs ache and he breathes hard, but it feels wonderful. For the first time in a while everything that ails him is being earned. The cold air in his lungs digs deep into his guts, as if he’s able to fully expand them finally. Maimeri lopes along, unbothered, even weighed down by twice as much as Lyric.
They stop for lunch a quarter of the way up the mountain on a thrust of cliff where the trees fall away and the dark forest is visiblefor miles of rolling hills and crags cut by what Maimeri says is a river. Probably still the Lapis in some form. Lyric stands at the edge, wind blowing him back, and seeks the smoke from Hehet town’s fires. It’s nearly out of sight, below and around the curve of the foothill. But a few massive kites or probably vultures drift among the thinning columns of smoke. The sky is painfully blue.
Once Lyric has been at rest to eat, his sweat turns him too cold and he shivers. It’s novel but distracting, until Maimeri digs a coat out from one of the packs the headwoman gave them. Lyric shrugs into it, startled by its weight and softness. It must be wool, maybe from those long-haired goats, but there are leather panels at the shoulders and elbows, and it ties up his torso not quite snug enough. There’s a hood that fits over his cold head, with enough of a cowl to shade his eyes.
Lyric hugs it close, feeling a different kind of vertigo suddenly: how bizarre this moment is. That Lyric méra Esmail, the Vertex Seal, is somehow here on this old mountain with a chimera and the father of the mirané people, buffeted by cold wind and the distant cry of a kite, but warmed by a coat given freely to him for no real reason other than he needed it.
Behind him Setka and Maimeri are repacking, and Setka has asked again how many of the chimeras in the valley can speak. “All of them,” Maimeri promises in ahz quiet way. “But not all for Setka to understand.”
“Ugh, Maimeri, how many can speak toSetka?” she demands.
Lyric smiles at her confidence.
Maimeri shrugs one shoulder. “Find out,” az says, standing.
“If Setka needs patience, count breaths while climbing,” Lyric suggests, striding past them to take up the path again. He does it himself, breathing in long eight-counts and marking each cycle. It expands his energy even more. Lyric has the idle thought that he’s never felt so alive.
Just Lyric
That winter is the most relaxed of Lyric’s entire life.
The valley of monsters, as they call it in Hehet, is a small bowl near the center of the mountain, and each of the four peaks marks one of the four quarters. It is, as Lyric realizes the moment he steps inside, naturally balanced.
Something about the flow of wind and water, the stones of the mountain, the growth of the trees aligns the energy of the entire valley toward rising, flow, falling, and ecstatic forces. The valley sings with Silence, unanchored, free, and Maimeri has built a home for ahzself alongside the crystal-green lake at its heart. The simple complex of wooden buildings is single-storied, wrapping around the north side of the lake in two arms. Each building was added when necessary, including open-air rooms for different chimeras, one extending over the water on stilts. There are fenced-in yards and several gazebos creating the illusion of rooms. Maimeri built to ahz whims and the needs of those living with ahz.
One room, just off the kitchen, does have a short second story, except it is more of an aviary than a room, and Lyric’s entire body freezes in shock when he sees griffons perched along the rail as theyenter, staring at Lyric and Setka with huge tawny eyes, wings cupped and ears back in their most threatening pose. Five adults, and a few fluffy cub heads poking over the rail to watch.
Lyric lifts a hand to them; he can’t help it.
Maimeri clicks ahz tongue at the largest red griffon, then leads Lyric and Setka inside. Az points out where the unicorn Turo lives—a room half open to the elements with special doors that he can latch with his hooves—and the barnlike long building where reside uncannily clever snow foxes and a furry human-adjacent chimera Maimeri says they won’t see until she’s grown used to them, if ever. There are more chimeras who live out in the valley and join ahz for meals sometimes, or warmth in the winter, and drink almost daily from the lake. To Setka az offers her pick of the empty rooms, but makes no similar offer to Lyric, dropping their bags off in Maimeri’s own room. Lyric hesitates, looking around at the simple accommodations: a low hanging bed, swinging by ropes from heavy wooden rafters, a table with grass cushions, a standing bathtub, and access to the kitchen in one direction, an exit toward the toilet in the other.
“Lyric Aharté?” Maimeri says his name from halfway through the door to the kitchen.
Lyric decides to let Maimeri do as az wishes, swallowing his questions and protestations to continue their tour.
